Trentonian editorial: Voter Fraud not a myth

The talking points coming down from those the French refer to as the “bien pensant” — the self-anointed fashionable sophisticates — is that only Bull Connor bigots fuss about voter fraud.

Voter fraud, our high-minded progressives like to say, is a “dog-whistle” term to which Rush Limbaugh hominids are attuned. “Racial code” words, the bien pensant used to say.

This talking point, vigorously belabored by the Democratic Party, is now attested to by the party’s back-up propaganda ministry.

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All of the ministry’s commentary forces have been summoned to the Re-elect Obama ramparts. These include even such as G.B. Trudeau, proprietor of the esoteric (strictly for the clever in-crowd only) “Doonesbury” comic strip. His crow-like character “Jimmy” — Jimmy Crow, get it? — confirms in a recent strip that “voter fraud” is simply the latest disenfranchisement ruse of the segregationist set.

In the same vein, the bible of the bien pensant, the New Yorker, ran a piece titled “Voter Fraud Myth.” The piece nitpicks with, but falls way short of refuting, a book by two polemicists of conservative bent enumerating actual, real-life instances of alleged and proved voter fraud.

Among the evidence presented in the book (“Who’s Counting?” by John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky):

Five thousand four hundred ballots in Georgia reportedly cast in the names of the dearly departed. (The Georgia secretary of state said a prolongered clerical investigation would be required to confirm or refute the number.) Two hundred non-citizens reportedly found illegally registered to vote in Florida. The Democratic nominee for Maryland’s 1st Congressional District removed from the ballot after the discovery she had voted in both Maryland and Florida in 2006 and 2008 elections. An Arkansas state legislator and three co-defendants enter guilty pleas to voter fraud. A city council race in Vernon, Cal., overturned due to voter fraud.

And on and on and on.

An on-point quip by former Gov. Brendan Byrne that never fails to get a laugh from the audience goes like this: “When I die, I want to be buried in Jersey City so I can remain active in politics.”

It’s not a far-fetched premise that makes the joke work.

It’s an absurd position to say that even though every state has laws against voter fraud, they shouldn’t be enforced. You may say the fraud examples cited above are isolated cases. But you cannot honestly assert, as Trudeau et al. do, that there’s “virtually no” voter fraud.

Well, there’s one harm that comes to mind. Most big cities are one-party jurisdictions presided over by a Democratic apparatus that’s positioned, in a photo-finish election, to turn out a decisive margin of phantom voters.